INSULATED WEALTH 



RAY STANNARD BAKER, 1889 



I have two or three things I should like to talk about here 

 today — some things I have been turning over in my mind for a 

 long time, things I am especially glad to have the opportunity 

 of saying at a jubilee gathering like this, the real object of which 

 is to survey the accomplishment during half a century of a new 

 kind of education. 



Not long ago I was talking with one of the foremost charity 

 organizers of New York City a man who spends a great many 

 thousands of dollars every year in advancing various good causes. 

 I asked him if he did not find difficulty in raising the immense 

 sums of money required by his activities. His answer some- 

 what surprised me. "Of course," he said, "but the chief diffi- 

 culty is not in raising money but in knowing how to spend it 

 wisely." He called attention to the immense benefactions of 

 Rockefeller, and Mrs. Russel Sage; he said that Carnegie was 

 finding it a harder task to give away his fortune wisely than it 

 had been to make it. He told me of a rich man who had worked 

 for months devising a method of expending $250,000 for a cer- 

 tain benevolence, so that in the end the money would not do 

 more harm than good. 



My friend was talking of charity, but his remarks, it seemed 

 to me, applied more widely to the activities of our modern Ameri- 

 can life. It is popular at this moment to execrate our richest 

 men, our Rockefellers and Carnegies; but after all, are they 

 not a pretty fair representation of us as a people ? 



Broadly speaking, we Americans have learned how to pile up 

 wealth, but we fail in knowing how to use it wisely. 



In the last seventy years we have learned to apply machinery 



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